Posts Tagged ‘random’

Last time, I made a massive list of games that stood out for me so far. Well, with such long live streams and with a lot more games under my belt (92!), I had to make another list. So without further ado, here are games that stood out for me, in no particular order:

Even though it’s slow and tedious, I just love the how creative this game uses its simple game mechanic: attract dots using a single point-light. The important part is to use the walls to prevent the point-light from spreading at the wrong places.

No, I’m pretty serious: I had a lot more fun with a coin toss simulator than you’d think. Instead of determining whether you’re going to get heads or not, this game involves destroying anything fragile in the room. It’s a classic in my book.

Want to be a complete jerk and have full control over the TV’s channels? Banana TV is for you! In this game, you attempt to predict who your audience is going to be using environmental clues, then lay havoc on them by….forcefully making them watch something awful. The caricatures in this game are absolutely hilarious!

War is being waged on a single petri dish as your cells multiply and kill off opposing cells. This bizarre simulator involves dropping chemicals to assist your own cells in an attempt to take over an entire colony. Fascinating and mesmerizing, though a little hard to comprehend.

For all the missteps this game makes when it comes to combat, its unique paper-cut-out graphics and twisted story makes Case #31 so memorable. There’s something magical when the scene switches over, placing all the props into a new stage for the story to play out.

It’s no secret that I love puzzle games, and PhotoBound has them in spades. Not only does it carefully teach you how the game mechanics work without instructions, its puzzles are incredibly creative and difficult to boot. I recommend it, 100%.

A classic tile-based puzzle game with the creepiest snowman ever. In this game, you build snowmans using the limited amount of snow-tiles scattered throughout each level, and it will stump you. Hard. And I love it!

This game gets a mention due to its adorable (and in my opinion, stellar) audio design. Sure, it’s just Katamari Damacy with terrible camera placement, but just listen to the game! It melts my heart (and inflate it 3-times as large; emotions are weird).

I never expected a MMO for Ludum Dare, let alone a MMO snowboarding game. Yet, here we are. This game deserves a mention for its technical excellence, creating a fun, very polished arcade game where you play against other people to score as many flips as possible. It’s chaotic fun!

It’s hard to make a balanced multiplayer game when you’re on a deadline, but Platform 31 achieves just that. This simple sideways shooter pits two robots against each other. Lots of elements help turn things to your favor, including barriers, power-ups, and controls that can swerve your bullets around said barriers.

Man, this game succeeds in giving me a jump scare. This horribly unfair arcade game does have a few (or one, really) trick up its sleeves that made it more than just a game on an old screen. Play it, find out for yourself what tricks it has for you!

Bugs are inevitable in nearly all software, especially games. This game is a rare example that takes full advantage of its bugs to create a surprisingly unique experience. Take note: accidents aren’t always failures!

A puzzle game where you fold your way through. Not only is it creative, but it’s one of the few puzzle games that has more than just a few solutions per level. Plus, it stumped me multiple times, and I like that.

Have you ever wanted to play Tetris Attack, Snake, and Pong all at the same time. Neither did I, but apparently this game cared enough to make you go through that torture. A messy game, this game will constantly keep you on the edge of your seat.

Easily the most fun I had this entire Ludum Dare, 1 Screen Hero is challenging, puzzling, full of action, polish, charm, and…oh, it’s just soooooo good! I highly recommend checking out this randomly generated rogue-like Zelda-thon.

This point & click adventure game has voice-acting. And yes, it’s really awesome voice-acting. The puzzles are pretty interesting as well, as with unlocking multiple endings. And, oh gosh, what a bleak story!

Yes, this is yet another joke game, and yet it’s one of the few that really struck me emotionally. It’s such a wonderful experience to play a game that comes out of the left field, and this, well, this was really unexpected. Be prepared for some surprises, because this game is packed with them.

Polish. This twin-stick shooter has it, and in spades. Despite its lack of innovation, it’s addicting, feels great to play, and strongly encourages you to best your score. There’s a lot to learn from this game, and I had a lot of fun playing it!

What an intense puzzle game! Walk to the door involves controlling the window our hero is walking on to direct his movement, and it’s absolutely astonishing how invested you get into the unique puzzle layout the creator laid out for you. A wonderful experience all around, this is a game you don’t want to miss!

A planet randomly generated using Perlin noise. Not sure where to go from here, but it’s some form of progress. At the moment it’s just a height map, so I might add in temperature and biomes or non-earth-like planets.

Hi Everyone, our take on the theme was an action/arcade game based on a randomly generated grid that was filled with colors and mines. The player could select one color to reveal at a time, thus showing the safe cells. This game came out much harder than we expected since there was little skilled involved. We ended up creating special abilities to balance it out: such as armor, reveal, jump, etc. Also, we tied each ability/color to a positive character traits: courage, perseverance, resilience, and forgiveness. Here’s a run down of the good and the bad:

What went right:

Polish. The game had logo, sound, artwork, and there were no bugs.

Although difficult, the game was generally fun.

The visual design was minimalistic, colorful, and most importantly, something we produced within our skill and time limitations.

We experimented with a new creative process and the result was not too shabby. We plan to keep refining our approach.

Easily published for Web, Windows, and OSX using Unity. We wanted the game available to as many people as possible.

What went wrong:

The game was really challenging because we didn’t have enough gameplay elements to empower the player. We could have identified this sooner and planned accordingly.

It was more based on luck than skill. It didn’t feel like you can improve skill and overcome the challenge.

We aimed for 5 minute game session, it averaged 30-45 seconds.

The introduction story was conceptualized after the core mechanics. It was trying to provide purpose via a “spiritual elements” concept, which was too abstract for such a literal game.

There was no tutorial or instructions. We just tossed the player into deep waters without teaching them how to swim.

Even though our creation is essentially a “glorified minesweeper variant’, we are very happy with the game. We are continuing to work on it and making it the best it can be.

My first Ludum Dare was neither a success or a failure. I managed to “finish” the game enough to submit it in time, but it lacks so many of the things I drew up at the beginning of day one.

Things I learned:

– Plan how to use your time, just as you plan the game. I ended up cutting like crazy in the last two hours just to submit something that felt somewhat finished.

– Start with a pre-made engine. I spent hours in the beginning setting up my core classes that I could’ve really used at the end.

or

– Use pre-made art. I was more focussed on the code, but I still spent SOME time drawing that could’ve easily been replaced with some (far better) open license stuff.

– Decide before the theme is announced roughly what TYPE of game you want to make and think about it. I had planned out the whole game in the first hour, but I hadn’t really considered how long the code would take for the game from scratch. With more thought beforehand I could’ve planned out the code better and hit the ground running.

This program generates random images based on a code (which is shown at the bottom) and mutates them. When you click on one of the images, you’ll see it in full size at the right and all images will start to evolve from that point on. If none of those get any better, you can restart the same code by clicking on the large image.

Once you have found an image you want to use for something, you could capture the screen and save it somewhere as a bitmap, but the idea is to simply save the code and use a function to generate the image at any time.

The library is for haXe, it generates a BitmapData from a given String. It shouldn’t be too hard to port it to as3 as well.

I spent the morning not doing anything, most of the afternoon playing UT2004 and Red Alert 3, but then maybe 2.5h ago I figured I should actually try doing anything. So I started out drawing some graphics (mostly vegetation sprites). Then I coded a little to get a random forest sort of thing.

And it’s doomed, you know. You are going to convert this cute little forest into a dark waste. At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see.

As the audio geek I am, I find it a bit unfortunate that most LD48 entries are usually silent. I figure it’s probably due to the authors not having a quick ‘n’ easy application at hand for making sound effects and therefore neglecting that aspect of the game in favor of code and, usually, graphics. Even simple sound effects can add a huge amount of immersion and fun to a game, though.

What I present here is, if you will, an MS Paint for sound effects… or something along those lines. It’s meant to make it dead easy for anyone to whip up a few simple sound effects and save them as .WAV files for playback using most game/media libraries like SDL or pygame.

The interface is based entirely around sliders for controlling sound parameters, along with a few buttons. Even if you don’t want to spend time learning about all the sliders you can still have some fun just hammering away at them and listening to the various sounds that come out.

Hopefully this will mean that there’s no longer any valid excuse for anyone to get N/A in sound!

Source code is obviously included in the portable archive, and anyone is free to use or modify it for anything they please. There’s no need to credit me, although it would be nice if you did. I would also appreciate a little email note if you do create something cool based on my code.

If I get around to making a little update I’ll include source code in the win32 archive as well.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands is a game made within 14h for the LD8 Swarms compo. However, it was never really entered into the compo, because I felt it wasn’t quite enough, but also couldn’t figure out how to make something more of it. In the end, I abandoned it, and instead used it as a base for Ultra Fleet, which I did enter. This might not have been the best of decisions, but no matter.

You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.

There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.

Random Dungeon Exploration is the result of trying to push the Random theme as far as possible. It got random levels, random enemies, random quests (well, a little bit random!), random items, random player names, and random events. I guess it could have been even more random, but time was a limiting factor.

As for the actual gameplay, it’s fairly simple step based dungeon crawling. And a ‘town’ screen where you can shop and select dungeons. It felt pretty solid, but there were a lot of balancing issues that you’d notice once you reached some higher levels.

The game was well received, placing second in the ‘Fun’ and ‘Production’ categories, and also getting the ‘Best In Show’ UBER prize.